Utilizing Open-Source Software to Build a (Relatively) Secure, Spam- and Virus-Free Mail Service

Electronic mail (email) services have become critical to survival, whether a commercial business, non-profit organization, or government agency, in today's information-centric world. There are a myriad of solutions for providing email services, some are cost-effective and some are cost-prohibitive. Typically, the best solutions for providing email services are either cost-prohibitive or technically-complex or both, while the lower-cost or lower-complexity solutions are often lacking features that most will agree are critical in email services today such as effective virus and spam controls1. This document shows an example of a relatively easy-to-implement, professional-looking, reasonably-secure solution that offers several features that are very useful and are often out-of-reach, either due to cost or technical expertise required, for small to medium sized organizations.2 This solution should work well for a few hundred, but not thousands, of users with only a small amount of tweaking to improve performance depending on how many users will be attaching at once and the performance of the hardware on which it is deployed.